The present invention relates to a plant operation support system for finding causes of malfunctions in a plant using process data and instructing appropriate operation guides.
As each plant enlarges its capacity and becomes complicated in structure, it becomes increasingly important that operational reliability of the plant is improved. When a malfunction occurs in the plant, it is necessary that the operative state of the plant at this time is correctly assessed so that an adequate remedial operation is performed corresponding to the present state of the plant.
When a malfunction is caused in a plant, a conventional plant operation support system for diagnosing a malfunction in a plant first reasons a cause for the malfunction (e.g., a phenomenon 1) based on a fault tree representing a correlation among a plurality of phenomenons as shown in FIG. 1 by using process data available at this time. Then, after a final cause of the malfunction, i.e., either one of terminal phenomenons 5 to 9 on the fault tree associated with the phenomenon 1 is detected, the malfunction cause and an operation guidance for curing the malfunction cause are displayed as a result of the diagnosis on the screen of a display unit.
However, even though a malfunction is caused in the plant and a diagnosis for finding a cause of the malfunction, the final cause (a terminal phenomenon on the fault tree) cannot necessarily be identified at all times. In case that the final cause fails to be identified, nothing is displayed as a malfunction cause on the screen of the display unit. In other words, no operation guidance is displayed so as to obviate the malfunction cause.